This chapter describes Hegel's critique of the logic of the Aristotelian tradition, going back to Aristotle's organon. It argues that Hegel has an immanent critique of this logic, according to which it cannot justify itself in a non-question begging way. It explains why Hegel regards this logic as empirical, even though it is not so in any straightforward way. Some attention to the constitutivism of the Aristotelian tradition, and its interest in the norms internal to certain capacities or faculties we possess. This is not psychologism, in Frege's sense, but it is objectionably psychological according to Hegel. At the close, I suggest that Hegel's critique of Aristotle's logic is effectively the same as his critique of Kantian pure general logic.

Brecht the theater theoretician is better described as the theater practitioner. His innovative concepts that have come to mark the modern theater were the product of his reflections on the experiments and lessons he learned from his collaborative work in the theater and on the stage. In short, Brecht’s staging practices ground the “Brechtian” approach to theater, even though he never articulated a formal acting method, sometimes contradicted himself, and rarely recommended that actors or theater practitioners with whom he worked read his theoretical writings. This essay traces the development of key concepts around notions of nonmimetic realism and anti-illusionary theater that fed into the epic theater as well as his views of anti-consumerist spectatorship, produced in the theater through episodic structure, distancing or Verfremdung, historicization, and the social Gestus. The centrality of contradiction and dialectical thinking became for Brecht the basis of negation and imagining innovative forms in the theater for his political agenda of changing society, most clearly accomplished in his model of the Lehrstück or learning play aimed at the collective learning process of the actors.

In this chapter, I continue to follow the manner in which Alfarabi describes the historical development of scientific awareness out of the murky depths of pre-scientific activity. Towards the peak of this development is the emergence and elaboration of the dialectical art, whose uses for science is Alfarabi's special concern in what follows. Dialectic is the method to the fundamental premises of all science. For instance, the Organon itself culminates in the Topics. Even if we regard the Posterior Analytics as the supreme analytical art, we cannot help but notice the way in which Aristotle carefully points out the ultimately hypothetical character of science (episteēmeē). Because of what may be described as the hypothetical character of scientific knowledge––that is, due to the fact that so much depends on the investigator's conviction regarding the truth of those first principles that provide the foundation of science––there will be those, according to Aristotle and Alfarabi, who deny the very possibility of scientific knowledge. The difficult problems that emerge over the status of scientific knowledge force us to confront the issue concerning the proper starting points (archai) or principles from which a syllogism proceeds but which are not reached by syllogism.

The dialectical art which Alfarabi outlines in the Book of Dialectic addresses the reigning confusion surrounding the context theory, which refers to the form of Aristotle’s Organon inherited by the medieval Arab philosophers from an earlier Alexandrian tradition. I argue that Alfarabi intended to recover an understanding of science, dialectic, rhetoric, sophistry and poetics that is Platonic or Socratic in nature. Instead of (like Aristotle) understanding science, dialectic, rhetoric, sophistics and poetics as separate and somewhat exclusive compartments within the greater philosophic or scientific enterprise, Alfarabi’s considered view of science precluded such a radical sort of division. The “context theory” should then be viewed as simply a modern, shorthand way of confronting the Platonic correction of the more common ordering of the arts of logos. For the philosopher as dialectician is much too cognizant of those basic prerequisites of philosophizing (to which he must constantly return) to permit him to rest satisfied with any overly technical framework that does not do justice to those conditions. I will insist that the Alfarabi that emerges here is not a typical Platonist: he is a Socratic or rather a philosopher in that sense of the term.

The introduction concerns my division of the entire Arabic text and a brief discussion of the ways in which the various parts of the discussion fit into the larger whole. It groups the numerous divisions into parts and explains why my commentary will consider the parts in a specific order. It also offers a brief biography of Alfarabi including notes on his intellectual successors, a survey of historical reports concerning the ways in which his expansive body of work was received, in addition to a brief treatment of the art of dialectic as it was depicted by Plato’s Socrates and Aristotle.